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Creativity 50 2015: Rana el Kaliouby

Chief Strategy and Science Officer, Affectiva

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Rana el Kaliouby envisions a future where all consumers will have chips in their mobile devices that can read emotions, understand the user's mood and, in turn, optimize accordingly any digital experiences that person might want.

As part of this vision, Ms. el Kaliouby is developing a technology that will recognize and capture a person's facial and emotional responses in real time -- tech that she believes will have important implications for the advertising and marketing industries. The chief strategy and science officer of startup Affectiva said her company's mission is to bring emotional intelligence to the consumer's user experience.

"When you're watching a 30-second ad, you're doing all these things with your face," she said during Ad Age's Small Agency Conference in August. "Our tech is able to capture that and aggregate it over hundreds of thousands of people and triangulate which scenes were the most emotional, engaging or which were the most polarizing. That gives market researchers unique insights around the content so they can optimize it."

Ms. el Kaliouby argues that detecting and decoding facial expressions is the way of the future. "We think this is the future of the digital world," she said. "And we think our digital experiences are missing emotions. And that is a bad thing."